Technology may soon decipher doctors’ handwriting

Kuang Chen, CEO of Captricity, has heard all the jokes about doctors' handwriting. When I sat down with him at the company's Berkeley headquarters to discuss his company's newest launch, a HIPAA–compliant scanning service that turns doctors' and nurses' notoriously indecipherable chicken–scratch notes into XLS spreadsheets, it's one of the very first things he mentioned. But for Captricity, a byproduct of the Code for America Accelerator, helping make these notes clear and usable is a serious need to be filled. After all, the Affordable Care Act requires health–care providers, insurers, and third parties to use electronic health records (EHR) and Captricity wants to be the service that turns hurried scribbles into easy–to–read and –file spreadsheets.